It feels like 1992 all over again.

I first got online around 1985 via a local BBS. I was on CompuServe a year later, and the pre-graphical web in 1990. Through all this time I kept sounding the alarm: The online world is going to change the practice of public relations and organizational communication. Mostly my warnings were dismissed. By 1992, when the web was just starting to heat up, I would tell organizations they needed a website. “Why would we need one of those?” was the most common answer.

Today, I’m saying much the same thing about chatterbots (or chatbots or just plain bots), and the answers I get sound like this:

• It’s just one more technology that distances audiences from real, authentic human beings.
• Bots will just create a new version of the cluttered inbox.
• We’re headed for bot overload.
• Bots are just like yet another complicated phone menu tree people hate to use.

These responses—which I have now heard hundreds of times—suggest communicators don’t get bots any more today than we got the web 24 years ago.

Communicators would be well-served to think of bots as agents, which act on the user’s behalf to accomplish something. That could be booking a flight or delivering desired information. Bots are all about simplifying tasks, not complicating them. Take a couple of examples of bots now available in Facebook’s Messenger app. Requesting a ride from Uber is as simple as typing “Uber” in the search field, then tapping the car icon. Ditto ordering flowers or checking flight status. Most interactions are accomplished just by texting a question to the business, like, “Can I book a room tonight?”

Bots generally won’t replace human interaction. They will, rather, replace apps. The idea is to simplify processes that are more cumbersome when performed via an app. (To be completely honest, removing a real person from tech support wouldn’t be all that awful under most circumstances. Rather than navigate through a phone tree, then listen to crappy hold music for 15 minutes punctuated with occasional reminders that my call is important, only to be connected to a tech support staffer who flips through a manual looking for answers before elevating my case to tier 2 support, I can just send the symptom as a text message and get the best answer within seconds.)

The fact is, there’s very little person-to-person interaction taking place in branded apps. Rather, people navigate menus to perform a limited set of interactions. The approach one company takes to an interaction on its app is likely to be completely different than that developed for an app by another company. By pivoting that interaction to messaging—an activity more and more people are embracing to the extent that messaging apps are overtaking social networks—the process is greatly simplified.

Getting relevant news and information another bot opportunity. Interacting with CNN’s bot on Messenger, I asked for “stories for you.” The bot responded instantly with a piece about filmmaker J.J. Abrams dishing up a clue about Rey’s parents from “The Force Awakens.” Yes, that was a story that interested me.

Having all of this available within a single messaging app (whether it’s Messenger or Kik or just plain old SMS messaging) makes life a lot simpler. With close to 1 billion people using Messenger alone, and Messenger and WhatsApp processing 60 billion messages per day, the audience is primed and ready. (Honestly, if I can use Messenger to check in for flights and check the status of my flights by sending a simple message, I’d be delighted to delete the half-dozen airline apps that currenly clutter the travel folder and eat up storage on my smartphone.)

It’s no surprise that businesses are exploring bots and several are rolling them out as a transactional tool. Buy theater tickets, book dinner reservations, order flowers, schedule a flight, these are all uses that make great sense.

Communicators and bots

There are communication applications that make sense, too, but I have not heard of a single bot built to address internal communications or media relations—and those are just two examples of organizational communication activities that can be simplified and made more relevant through bots.

Some companies (like Royal Bank of Scotland) have introduced media relations apps. The RBS app, for instance, includes corporate news, annual and quarterly reports, management presentations, a financial calender, and other features reporters and investors could use. Filling a phone with the media/investor app from every company a journalist covers or an investor holds stock in? That’s nuts. Investors and reporters could easily get the same information by requesting it conversationally over a messaging channel, assuming the company has built a bot. Reporters could also request interviews, ask questions, request artwork, and do a lot of the work that currently requires visiting a web page or picking up the phone.

If you work with a reporter who cut his teeth writing on a manual typewriter, it’s highly unlikely bots will be high on his wish list. Millennial journalists are another story, as are Millennial employees, one of the demographics that has driven the shift to messaging apps. I remember conducting a focus group at a production facility across the country from the company’s headquarters. Despite having computer workstations set up at the back of the facility, nobody in the group ever accessed the company’s intranet. I asked why.

“The news is all about headquarters,” they said. “We don’t care what’s going on at headquarters. It has nothing to do with us.”

I asked how interested they would be if they could subscribe to get text messages whenever there was news about their facility or the brands that were produced there. One employee responded, “I’d sign up in a heartbeat and check those messages the instant they arrived.” The rest of the group agreed.

Fast-forward four years and imagine those employees able to message the word SHIFTS and get the schedule for tomorrow’s work shifts. Or the name of a product they make to get the latest news about it. Or (as unlikely as it may be) HQ to get the latest news from corporate headquarters. A little imagination and you can probably come up with thousands of bits of content to make available to employees and other stakeholders who ask for it.

Mark my words: Bots like these are coming to the workplace, to media relations, to public relations. They are coming just as surely as the web was going to completely disrupt the way communications was done a quarter century ago. (So are more sophisticated bots that employ Artificial Intelligence, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) The only question is whether most communicators will be at the vanguard of the change or playing catch-up.

If you want to learn more about bots and their imminent role in the communications industry, register for my May 20 webinar. One registration is good for your entire department, and you’ll have access to the video recording after the webinar is over. Register here.